1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a pattern recognition apparatus. In particular, it relates to an improved method for forming a featured template to be used when the patterns are compared and collated, and a method for weighting the feature template.
2. Description of the Related Art
In a conventional method for recognizing patterns, the object patterns are compared and collated with template patterns previously registered, and a decision is made that the template pattern having the least degree of mismatching (or most degree of matching) is identified as the object pattern.
The drawback to this type of pattern recognition is that there is poor discrimination between similar patterns. Namely, when very similar patterns are compared, incorrect recognition may occur. This is because there are only a few mismatching portions between the similar patterns, and the degree of mismatching between the object pattern and the template pattern in a similar pattern category is low and the same as the degree of mismatching caused by an imperfection or quantum error in the object pattern itself.
To remove the above-mentioned drawbacks, the following method is used. That is, the different portions between the similar patterns are registered as the featured patterns and then are carefully compared and collated (i.e., weighted) with the object pattern to improve the recognition accuracy. However, in this method, it is necessary to obtain the feature points between the similar pattern pairs and to preform the feature template.